Archive for September, 2008

Under the headline of “Doubts surround death of an Evangelical pastor”, daily El Deber, Santa Cruz, published the following report I thought I should share with you.

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The remains of Luis Antonio Rivero, the Evangelical Pastor killed during the military take-over of the airport (Friday) of Cobija, were moved to his home town of Guayaramerín (on Sunday), after an oddyssey. The military did not allowed that an airplane left the airport with the body. The corpse was transported by land to a run strip about three hours by car from Cobija. With the body in Guayaramerín (on the border with Brazil) Rivero was declared “martyr of autonomy.” According to his relatives, the military held the body along 18 hours before it was released. It was still warm.

Relatives obtained a legal authorization for an autopsy. The autopsy evidenced four holes caused by two bullets. One of the bullets was shot ten or twelve hours after the first. After the second wound, he remained alive between four and six hours. All the (four) injuries were stuck with screws and glued in with the Gotita (an artificial glue). (The report does not say what caliber the bullets were nor it indicates the probable distance of the shots.)

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After reading this report one cannot but hope that the investigative commissions that should arrive in Cobija also go to Guayaramerin. This man was under an atrocious agony lasting 14 to 16 hours before he died. Many questions remain open. Why the military held a man in agony? Why he was murdered with a shot de grace?Who is responsible or who gave the order to execute him? It was a painful example and a painful anticipation of what might lie ahead in Bolivia. Is this the kind of government of the so-called ”socialism of the 21st century”? If it is so, it is only a regression in time to Stalin, Beria and the Gulag era.

Bolivia has just experienced a traumatic and legally controversial recall plebiscite. Nonetheless, the behavior of the Bolivian people was remarkable. Bolivians went to vote both massively and peacefully, determined to express their right to choose.

But now we are seeing with concern that the worst forecasts about this plebiscite are becoming a tragic reality. The recent riots in Santa Cruz, Sucre, Yacuiba and a painful etcetera, are only a first sample, likely to be followed by even worse events unless the leaders of the Nation change their attitude.

A new series of events is beginning to unroll with a recent package of government decrees calling Bolivians to vote on a Constitution draft widely considered as irregular. This move requires a law, but it ignores the Legislative Branch.

The journalists are among the first casualties in the brutal combat that covering news has become in Bolivia. They are threatened, insulted and brutally hit without the slightest respect for the role they accomplish for the society.

This is why, anguished by the down-hill way our country is getting at, under the complacent attitude of those who should look for unity and not confrontation, justice and not illegality, righteousness and not complicity with a widespread intolerance that is beginning to surpass its limits, the members of the National Tribunal of Ethics in Journalism, as it kicks off its public activities as a body of self-regulation in journalism,

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In Bolivia, free press and the safety of journalists are in a serious danger. They have become victims of situations of anarchy tolerated and – worse – instigated, by authorities and groups favoring authoritarianism.

Bolivia offers a desolate legal landscape. The country seems living in a desert where any illegality may happen due to the induced failure of the rule of law by institutions and individuals whose mission is rather to preserve it.

This landscape is compounded by a situation of moral failure in which corruptors and corrupted work hand in hand.

Tolerance seems lost smashed by the years-old pernicious practice of disqualifying those that think differently.

The country has fractionalized dangerously. The regions are forced to confrontation as opposing political and economic models promote division wherever they act.

The Government should be a factor of unity, but instead it seems committed to division instead of uniting; it accentuates disagreements instead of genuinely searching to overcome them, It commits illegalities and boasts its power to “legalize” them. Several regions are moving in a direction contrary to the Government’s. Thus the country is strained by forces working for its disintegration rather than its unity. Political opposition forces show no coherence with democracy nor offers believable and convincing hope to citizens.

The condition of fragile legality affecting the nation leaves it paralyzed and citizens unprotected and scared, their hopes diminished. Uncertainty prevails equally over institutions defending individual and collective freedoms, including the freedom of press.

The President adds to the uncertainty as he announces he will “deepen” a socialism he cannot explain. However, he leads the country to think it is on the brink of a system that failed wherever it was experienced and under which one of the biggest victims was the freedom of expression. It was sunk with no exceptions in an immense Gulag.

It does not comfort citizens to watch their President treated like a pariah within his own country, for he cannot move freely within it.It is not democratic that after two and a half years as President he has not been able to respond to the press’ legitimate questions in thorough and clarifying press conferences as any democratic leader should.

We watch with awe and fear the recurrent attacks against the media and the multiplication of verbal and physical aggressions on journalists working on news coverage.

The Legislative branch approves decisions that confuse the population, eroding the credibility regarding lawmakers. The claim that the Legislative branch lives under threatening blackmail from extra-legal forces is not enough to dispel that erosion, nor to dissipate suspicions about the integrity of some of its members.

Before this succession of events that have already caused dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, and a year practically lost in clashes ever more violent, we want to urge the society, especially journalists, to be alert against the storms that still threaten all of us in Bolivia.

We call upon the President that, out of respect of his Presidential dignity and of those who elected him, he stops insulting journalists. And if he accuses anyone of us, he should do it submitting real evidence, as any President – or any citizen for that matter – should.

Imbued by these motivations, we call upon the Legislative Branch to immediately start designating, for the sake of its own redemption, an honest and reliable Constitutional Tribunal, committed to Justice, as the first step to put again the nation on a firm institutional path.

We reiterate to journalists that their best defense is their professional integrity and the persisting search of true, balanced and full information, thus helping the Bolivian society to better see its horizons and find civilized ways of overcoming its present difficulties.